The Modern Spanish Sonnet

By John Rutherford

The fine tradition of the Spanish sonnet, developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the subject of Rutherford’s The Spanish Golden Age Sonnet (2016), has been extended and developed during the subsequent centuries. This book presents one hundred of the best sonnets of the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including sonnets written in the Catalan and Galician languages, together with their translations into modern English sonnets and a critical commentary on each. There is a general introduction to the genre, followed by summaries of the historical and literary backgrounds and a discussion of the problems facing the translator of sonnets. The life and works of each poet are summarised and a select bibliography of further reading concludes the volume. The translations bring these sonnets to new life in the modern English language, and they can be read both as interesting and lively poems in their own right and as leads into the originals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781837720712

Book preview

Preface

This book is a continuation of The Spanish Golden Age Sonnet (University of Wales Press, 2016; referred to henceforth as SGAS). Much of the material presented in the introduction of that book is relevant here.

After the magnificent achievements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish poets have maintained an uninterrupted sonnet tradition, and this book presents over a hundred of the most interesting, influential and representative examples from Spain in the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I have included works by all the most important post-seventeenth-century Spanish sonneteers, together with less well-known pieces that deserve attention. Sonnets written in the Spanish, Catalan and Galician languages are included. Rubén Darío was Nicaraguan, but his contribution to the development of the Spanish sonnet was decisive and his exclusion would have left the story incomplete. The selected poets appear in chronological order of their dates of birth. For each sonnet I have provided a translation in the form of an English sonnet, together with a critical commentary that, for reasons of space, aims to be suggestive rather than exhaustive. For each poet there is a brief summary of life and works.

For the advice and help I have received from my family and my friends, particularly Laura Blanco de la Barrera, Ignacio Chao, Xesús Fraga, María Liñeira, Mano Panforreteiro, Víctor Rodríguez Gesto and Sílvia Xicola Tugas, I am deeply grateful. I am indebted to my daughter Rosa Rutherford for solving the many difficult problems of copyright that beset a book like this. It has again been a great pleasure to work with the University of Wales Press.

Introduction

The sonnet

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the Petrarchan form had long been established for the Spanish sonnet (SGAS, pp. 1–4): fourteen paroxytone (stressed on the penultimate syllable) eleven-syllable lines or hendecasyllables, the first eight (the octave) rhyming ABBA ABBA to form two quatrains, the last six (the sestet) usually rhyming CDC DCD or CDE CDE to form two tercets. Other combinations are possible in the sestet, so long as no rhyme from the octave is used there and no contiguous lines rhyme with each other. At the beginning of the ninth line (the volta), the change of form is accompanied by a change of content, giving an overall bipartite, curiously asymmetrical structure of a presentation in the octave followed by a slightly briefer response in the sestet, a slight quickening of the pace that obliges this response to be appropriately forceful. This arrangement offers many specific possibilities, such as description and meditation, description and narration, general rule and particular case (or vice versa), question and answer, argument and counter-argument, assertion and retraction, event and consequences. Throughout the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century this pattern was followed with few exceptions, the principal one being that the change of content, or thought-turn, as we could call it, was sometimes displaced from the volta to the beginning of the second tercet, because of a need for a fuller presentation and an even punchier response. This development, for which there are precedents in earlier sonnets, can be regarded as either an unfortunate departure from one of the sub-genre’s most essential structuring principles or an interesting experiment that foreshadows the changes introduced in the late nineteenth century.

The Spanish hendecasyllable is similar to the English iambic pentameter. The Spanish counting method differs from the English one in that it includes the unstressed syllable that follows the final stressed one, so a Spanish eleven-syllable line is the equivalent of an English ten-syllable line. In addition to the hendecasyllable’s necessary stress on the tenth syllable, there must be a stress on either the sixth or the fourth and eighth syllables, ensuring a predominantly duple rhythm (since adjacent syllables are not normally stressed) with possibilities for variation, just as in the iambic pentameter. (To avoid tiresome repetition, I use the word ‘stress’ to indicate a strong stress: to divide Spanish syllables into ‘stressed’ and ‘unstressed’ is helpful but misleading, because in reality they have different degrees of stress.) One of the hendecasyllable’s first three syllables is normally stressed. A stress on the first syllable gives what is known, logically enough, as an emphatic hendecasyllable; on the second, a heroic hendecasyllable (the commonest sort), with a constant duple, marching rhythm; on the third, a melodic hendecasyllable, with the lilting effect produced by the move from a triple rhythm in the first half of the line to a duple rhythm in its second half. The traditional Spanish hendecasyllable differs from the iambic pentameter in two ways: oxytone lines (those lacking an unstressed eleventh syllable after the stressed tenth one) are prohibited; and, as we have just seen, a strong, isolated stress on the third syllable is allowed, and indeed frequent.

The principles for counting syllables and locating stresses within a line of Spanish verse are straightforward. Unless a written stress indicates otherwise, a word of two syllables or more that ends in a vowel, ‘n’ or ‘s’ is stressed on its penultimate syllable, and a word ending in any other consonant is stressed on its last syllable. When two vowels occur together within a word they form a diphthong and therefore one syllable if either or both of the weak vowels (‘i’ and ‘u’) are involved, unless a written stress indicates otherwise; if only the strong vowels (‘a’, ‘e’ and ‘o’) are involved, they do not diphthongise, and form two syllables. Word-divisions are not necessarily syllable-divisions, because when any two vowels occur together within a line, one at the end of a word and the other at the beginning of the next, they merge and form one syllable, even if they are both strong and even if a punctuation mark intervenes between them – however counter-intuitive this seems. The letter ‘h’, not being pronounced, is ignored. Minor words like articles, prepositions and most conjunctions do not normally have stresses, which fall on semantically strong words like nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. The following lines from Gaspar Núñez de Arce’s sonnet ‘Los tiempos son de lucha’ (p. 78) illustrate all this. Strokes mark syllable-divisions, bold print indicates stressed syllables:

The rules for Galician and Catalan are similar. Sometimes poetic licence disregards a rule.

At the end of the nineteenth century the movement known as modernismo, led by the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío, brought revolutionary changes to Hispanic literature. Under the influence of the French nineteenth-century sonnet, the rigid formal constraints of the Petrarchan sonnet were relaxed, with alternate rhymes (ABAB ABAB) in the octave, changes in rhyme from the first quatrain to the second (ABBA CDDC, ABAB CDCD, ABBA CDCD and so on), and couplets in the sestet (EEF EEF, EEF GFG and so on). Very many different permutations emerged, but they all retained the traditional division of the octave into two quatrains, and that essential break in rhyme between the octave and the sestet. These modernista rhyme-schemes have been much used ever since. The unrhymed sonnet or antisoneto appeared in Spanish America in the early twentieth century and was much used there, for example by Pablo Neruda throughout his Cien sonetos de amor (A Hundred Love Sonnets, 1959), but few have been written in Spain. In general, modern Spanish poets have made much less free with the sonnet form than, for example, modern British and American ones.

Another important reform introduced by Darío and the modernistas concerned line-length. Inspired by French models, they wrote sonnets in lines of many lengths other than the traditional hendecasyllable, most influentially the alexandrine: fourteen syllables divided by a central caesura into two halves, called hemistichs. The alexandrine soon became, and has remained, one of the most popular metres among Spanish-language poets (not only in sonnets), because its three extra syllables facilitate both an important expansion of subject matter and many new rhythms. Each hemistich normally has either a duple rhythm, with stresses on the second and fourth syllables (or on one of these) as well as, necessarily, on the sixth; or a triple rhythm, with stresses on the third and sixth syllables; or a mixed rhythm, with stresses on the first, third or fourth, and sixth syllables.

The Galician sonnet follows Spanish principles, but Catalan has in many respects gone its own way, although it was similarly influenced by modernismo. The Catalan syllable-count is to the last stressed syllable in the line, as in French and English. The Catalan decasyllable is therefore the equivalent of the Spanish hendecasyllable, and Catalan alexandrines are described as having not fourteen but twelve syllables, two hemistichs of six syllables. There are, furthermore, three Catalan decasyllables quite unlike any modern Spanish hendecasyllable. One has stresses on the fourth, seventh and tenth syllables, giving the insistent triple rhythm avoided in the Spanish hendecasyllable ever since the Middle Ages because of the disconcerting contrast with its dominant duple rhythm; another has a stressed fifth syllable and a caesura after it, dividing the line into two hemistichs of five syllables; and since a large proportion of Catalan words are oxytones, there has never been any requirement for lines to end on an unstressed syllable.

In all sonnets, the relationship between metre and syntax is important. Sometimes these two coexisting structures coincide and work together, with end-stopped lines and an overall feeling of calm and stasis; but sometimes they clash and work against each other, with enjambement, sentences ending within lines, and an edgy sense of drama and dynamism, rather like syncopation in music.

The great sonneteers of the Golden Age have continued to exert a powerful influence. Their themes have been reworked or copied, their stories borrowed, their poetic logic (SGAS, p. 12) pressed into service, their rhetoric used to organise sonnet material. Rhetoric suffers from a bad reputation nowadays, and the adjective ‘empty’ often accompanies this word. Rhetoric is indeed frequently used by politicians to make feeble ideas seem important, but we should not assume that all ideas presented rhetorically are therefore feeble. For a good poet, rhetoric is a valuable way in which to make powerful and beautiful patterns out of words and ideas. Traditional terms are useful to identify rhetorical patterns in the modern Spanish sonnet. The following may be unfamiliar to some readers:

anadiplosis, the occurrence of the same word at the end of one sentence, clause or phrase and the beginning of the next;

anaphora, the occurrence of the same word or words at the beginning of successive sentences, clauses or phrases;

antonomasia, the use of an epithet in place of a proper name, or of a proper name in place of a generic idea;

chiasmus, reversed repetition, giving an ABBA or ABCCBA pattern;

epanalepsis, the occurrence of the same word or words at the beginning and end of a sentence, clause or phrase;

hyperbaton, the purposeful disruption of normal word order;

isocolon, exact structural parallelism in successive sentences, clauses or phrases;

metonymy, the naming of something’s attribute or adjunct instead of the thing itself;

oxymoron, the close combination of contradictory terms;

polyptoton, the repetition of a word in different forms;

polysyndeton, the repetition of a conjunction;

synecdoche, the representation of the whole of something by a part of it, or vice versa;

tenor, the subject to which a metaphor refers;

vehicle, the image that embodies the tenor of a metaphor;

zeugma, the use of one word, often a verb, to connect two (or more) other words, often nouns that are objects of that verb, in strikingly different (often witty) ways.

The sonnet, a miniature in words, has lasted so long because with its taut, patterned structure it is just small enough to be grasped as a whole and readily remembered, yet just large enough to convey rich depths of condensed meaning. Although it began life in the thirteenth century as a love poem, it has subsequently shown itself to be appropriate for every imaginable subject. Its formal constraints, intricate patterns of rhyme and rhythm, have been a constant stimulant of creativity. The intense concentration of feeling and meaning that it encourages makes it a splendid introduction to a poet’s work. As Don Paterson observes in his anthology 101 Sonnets, it is ‘a miraculous little form in which our human need for unity and discontinuity, repetition and variation, tension and resolution, symmetry and asymmetry, lyric inspiration and argumentative rigour, are all held in near-perfect oppositional balance’ (pp. xxvi–xxvii). The disfavour into which the sonnet has fallen among young Spanish poets, seduced by the facile attractions of free verse, will surely prove to be temporary.

The historical background

Towards the end of the seventeenth century there were signs in Spain of the beginning of a recovery from the political and economic decline of the previous years. The end of the Habsburg dynasty, dreadfully enervated by interbreeding, with the death of Carlos II in 1700, and its replacement by the Bourbons, was a good start to the eighteenth century, even though it gave rise to the War of the Spanish Succession (1700–4). This war being largely fought outside Spain, however, the slow recovery continued throughout the century. Commercial activity, especially trade, grew, and Spain’s colonies began to prosper under the enlightened despotism of generally competent governments.

This improvement was halted by Napoleon’s invasion of Spain and the resultant Peninsular War of 1808–14, in which Spanish and British forces resisted and eventually defeated the French invaders. During the incompetent absolutist reign (1814–33) of Fernando VII, Spain lost most of its American empire. A long period of instability followed, with frequent military and civilian uprisings. They culminated in a liberal revolution in 1868 that sent the scandalous Isabel II into exile. After further confusion and the failure of a republican government, Isabel’s son, Alfonso XII, was crowned in 1875.

Such constant unrest had impeded the economic, political and social progress achieved during the nineteenth century by other European countries, and the Restoration period (1875–1917) was characterised by the turno pacífico, the peaceful alternation in power: moderate liberals and moderate conservatives agreed that peace must be maintained, if necessary by rigging elections so that each side was restrained from violent action when defeated by the knowledge that its turn to govern again would come before long. Under Alfonso XII and his son, Alfonso XIII, some peace and economic progress did ensue. But essential problems were being shelved rather than solved, and the corruption at the heart of the turno pacífico created general disillusionment. In 1898, defeat in a disastrous war against the United States and the consequential loss of Spain’s remaining colonies, Cuba and the Philippines, were further blows to national morale. The unstable democracy eventually gave way to the dictatorship (1923–30) of General Miguel Primo de Rivera, the collapse of the monarchy, another republic (1931–6), General Francisco Franco’s revolt and the Civil War (1936–9).

After Franco’s victory his repressive right-wing dictatorship kept the peace in an exhausted and depleted Spain. Some economic progress eventually resumed in the 1960s. It accelerated when in 1975 Franco died and, to most people’s surprise, a liberal democracy was installed under King Juan Carlos. It has survived, now under his son Felipe VI, despite a spectacular attempt at a right-wing coup in 1981.

Madrid governments have imposed centralist policies. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Romantics found spiritual importance in local customs and traditions. As a consequence, intellectuals in Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia realised that these are not mere regions of Spain but nations with their own proud histories, cultures and languages. Their reactions against Madrid’s dogged centralism have ranged from peaceful political endeavour and refusal to relinquish their own languages to armed revolt, from struggles for greater autonomy within the Spanish state to demands for independence from it. The poorer parts of the country, such as Galicia, have suffered from mass emigration of men to Spanish America and, in the twentieth century, of both sexes to more prosperous European countries.

The literary background

Conventional wisdom tells us that the Spanish eighteenth century, overwhelmed by French culture, was a void between the achievements of the Golden Age and Romanticism. This is an oversimplification. The Enlightenment’s wealth of stimulating ideas prompted Spanish writers to produce work of great interest. And excellent sonnets were written, developing and enriching the tradition inherited from the seventeenth-century poets.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century there was a reaction, in the name of good taste, against the Baroque complexities of the seventeenth century. Exuberant wit was being suppressed by Romantic solemnity. Romanticism’s development in Spain was checked, however, by the repressive reign of Ferdinand VII and the exile of the principal Spanish Romantics because of their liberal convictions. Furthermore, the industrialisation against whose consequences Romanticism was in large part a reaction had hardly begun in Spain, so there was little to react against. At all events, the Spanish Romantics wrote few sonnets: their naive faith in unchecked inspiration led them to prefer verbosity and grandiloquence. The sonnet imposes a discipline alien to them. Of the two late Spanish Romantics who devoted more intelligence and control to their writing, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Rosalía de Castro, the former wrote, in his youth, just one sonnet (p. 84), excluded from most editions of his work, and the latter wrote none. As regards sonnets, at least, it is the nineteenth not the eighteenth century that disappoints. For although very many sonnets were written by a multitude of poets throughout the nineteenth century, most of them resorted to centuries-old clichés and dull pastiche. Almost the only nineteenth-century Spanish sonnets that are interesting are the eccentric ones, and several of those are included in this anthology.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century there were some reactions against Romanticism. They shifted Spanish poetry away from sentimental clichés and towards social, political and philosophical themes. Young writers began to concentrate on the problems that had impoverished Spain. Literary historians have labelled them ‘the Generation of 1898’, this being the year of the war against the United States and the loss of Cuba and the Philippines. But it was, also at the end of that century, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s radical renovation of Hispanic literature by the introduction of the ideas of the French Symbolists and Parnassians that transformed the sonnet. His modernismo was one of several fin de siècle European aesthetic movements, restatements of the Romantic reaction against scientific rationalism and industrialisation. By then, these had made more incursions into the Hispanic world, so the protest carried more weight. Art now had to create the beauty that life had lost.

Darío showed that sonnets can relax the tight constraints of their traditional Petrarchan form and still be sonnets, so long as the division between octave and sestet is maintained; and that they need not be regurgitations of Petrarchan ideas and diction. Even though, for modern taste, much modernista poetry is as bombastic as that of the Spanish Romantics, there is no doubting the importance of the revolution made by Darío and his followers. The great Spanish-language poets who started writing in the early twentieth century, like Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez, began in Darío’s style but soon moved away from it in search of their own voices (Miguel de Unamuno, never enthralled by modernismo, was the exception). Such poets reacted against Darío, but his revolution made their reactions, and hence their mature voices, possible.

The Jazz Age of the 1920s next had repercussions on Spanish literature. New movements like ultraísmo and creacionismo imported the latest international fashions. Ultraísmo urged a total break with the past, creacionismo strove for autonomous, non-representational art. Surrealism also made its mark. While established Spanish poets like Unamuno, Machado and Jiménez, for all of whom literature was a serious exploration of personal experience, disapproved of such frivolity, younger writers found inspiration in the new developments. A group of such poets in Madrid were also attracted to the work of the seventeenth-century poet Luis de Góngora (SGAS, pp. 117–49), whose writings had for over a century been reviled as monstrously over-complex. This group, of which Federico García Lorca was a prominent member, restored Góngora to the Spanish canon. In 1927 they celebrated the third centenary of his death, and literary critics have labelled them ‘the Generation of 1927’.

Next came the terrible interruption of Franco’s military revolt and the subsequent Civil War. During it and the grim years that followed many fine poets were imprisoned, exiled or killed. Those who remained responded to this bleak, impoverished, repressed Spain by either engaging with its problems in social and political poetry or seeking refuge in traditional sources of private consolation such as religious and love poetry. In the 1960s, as Spain started returning towards normality, there was a reaction against post-Civil War literary trends, and poetry began to be again practised as an exploration of personal experience, with Antonio Machado as a strong influence. Spain’s entry into the modern world was hastened by Franco’s death in 1975 and the installation of democratic government. Since then all the international literary trends have found their way into the country, in particular postmodernism from the 1980s onwards. Fewer sonnets have been written in Spanish in the last half-century, especially by younger writers, because free verse is all the fashion now.

The development of Catalan nationalism in the nineteenth century prompted a revival of literature written in the Catalan language: the Renaixença. At the beginning of the twentieth century, young writers reacted against what they saw as the rusticity of the Renaixença and they formed a new movement, Noucentisme. They were determined to modernise Catalan literature and cultivate a new urbanity. The Catalan sonnet flourished, under French influence.

Galicia’s nineteenth-century linguistic and literary revival is known as the Rexurdimento, and it was followed in the twentieth century by